EDITORIAL: So far, eviction ‘tsunami’ has been a gentle wave

Progressives and housing activists urgently warned of an “eviction tsunami” if the states and the federal government didn’t continue to mandate that landlords let tenants use their property for free during the pandemic. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., protested on the Capitol steps and predicted a “national tent city” without an eviction moratorium.

But six weeks after the Supreme Court let stand a lower court stay of the CDC’s eviction ban, the tidal wave remains far asea. “There does not appear to be concrete evidence,” The Washington Post wrote last month, “that the predicted surge of evictions has materialized.”

This gives credence to arguments from landlords that government virus edicts forced them to bear an undue burden.

Evictions increased across the country by about 9 percent in September after the high court’s action. But they remain below historic levels, according to Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, which tracks the numbers in six states and 31 cities, including Las Vegas.

“It’s going up, but it’s not going up by a ton …” Peter Hepburn, a sociology professor at Rutgers University and researcher with Eviction Lab told Reason magazine. “We didn’t see a jump up to normal, let alone a jump past normal into a giant wave of eviction filings.”

Clark County was a bit outside the national norm. Evictions in June, July and August were slightly higher than usual this year, but trended downward over those three months, the Eviction Lab reports. Numbers for September are not yet available but, suffice it to say, there has been no massive “tsunami” of evictions.

Observers offer a variety of potential explanations, including the fact that many states and local jurisdictions have ramped up rent relief payments. But billions remain unspent — federal officials say they may try to claw back some of that money — and there has been no large boost in evictions in locales that struggled to distribute the cash.

Perhaps there’s something else at work: Most landlords aren’t evil ogres.

An analysis by Harvard’s Joint Center For Housing Studies found “landlords were more likely to grant concessions to tenants, defer maintenance and reduce payments for debt and other expenses during the pandemic.” In other words, many property owners were eager to work with renters who were truly in distress. That makes sense — evictions are costly and time-consuming.

“My guess is if there had been no moratoria whatsoever, evictions would have still fallen very sharply in the spring of last year when landlords had very little shot of getting someone else in,” Salim Furth of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center told Reason, “and then bounced around at below normal levels.”

Evictions may rise in coming months. But that tsunami looks more like a rolling whitecap.